John Brantingham

Uphill From the Marsh Near Sherman, New York
 
I cocked my head at the sleet-rimed rock pile and thought about what the forest had been two hundred years ago when the rocks had been a part of a wall, hemming in cows, this land that had gone back to wild since its people had moved on.
 
Something hidden in the rocks chirped, something that watched me and maybe was commenting about the way I stood or what I would do next, something that maybe wanted me gone, something that knew this was no longer a place for humans, that had found a warm nook from the snow.
 
**
January Marsh
 
The ice on the marsh formed but cracked with wind ripples. On the far edge, bulrushes bent over because a creature I couldn’t see moved through the water. I thought that in a week, the temperature would turn down, and I could walk on that water, which is its own kind of miracle, and that animal, maybe a beaver or muskrat, maybe a goose who had stayed back from the migration, could too. This hidden creature and I watched for each other and wondered about each other and cared about nothing but each other for the eternity inside the moment.
 
**
Standing on the Edge of Quaker Lake
 
I counted ten crows on the iced over lake. There might have been more. Their voices came across to me, but it was cold, so they weren’t saying much.
 
Me by the reeds, cattails burst open reminding myself of something, a day in my long ago past before I had any words. 
 
The memory of cattails from a kid in the north. 
 
The memories of crows from back before life got in the way of childhood meditations that I could get so lost in that I’d lose an afternoon to thinking. 
 
Here I was, back in my child’s mind, warm.
 
**
 
A Stream Too Small to Name
 
 
The lake was iced over, but I could hear the stream feeding it still flowing under the snow, and I wondered how it would taste if I dipped my hand and drank the way I did from creeks when I was a child and hadn’t learned the specialized vocabulary of things that played hell on your body. I dreamed of life buried this time of year under the snow: snakes, skunks, and woodchucks down far as they could get. I dreamed of the complex and intricate patterns of fish beneath the ice, safe from the world of birds and people.
 
**
 
The Road to Collins
 
The small back roads through the marshes and woods were built on wagon tracks, which were built on deer paths and before them elk, buffalo, and mastodons because these were the easiest ways through the bush.
 
I have heard the ancient sound of elk bugling to each other, and I dream of them here, calling out in love or need, but they are gone to the forests of my New York. They are as gone to these paths as the bison and mastodons. They are as gone as chestnut trees. They are as gone as I will be soon enough.
 
**
 
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He is the editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.